News

Readers: Your chance to comment on today’s iOS 5 + iCloud news

By Jeremy Horwitz ● Monday, June 6, 2011

We’ve posted a huge collection of news stories regarding all of Apple’s iOS 5 and iCloud announcements today, and wanted to give you all an opportunity to discuss everything in one central location in advance of our editorial on the topic.

Did Apple impress you with the collection of features added to iOS 5? Are you excited or glad to hear about the free services coming in iCloud? Was anything really important missing today? Sound off in the comments section below.

Comments

1

No mention of how large a footprint Lion is going to take once it’s installed. How much bigger than SL.

Bad decision by Apple not to release Lion on DVD. Hopefully their will be away of getting it or burning it to a DVD.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 4:39 PM (CDT)

1

I’m quite disappointed in the iTunes aspect of iCloud, particularly the iMatch service. Apple is effectively charging people a monthly to listen to their own (not-from-iTunes) music. I’d rather pay once for an iOS device with more local storage, and leave it at that.

The rest of iCloud sounds like what MobileMe should have been from the beginning. My only worry is that the transition process will be terrible for the end user, as it was when MobileMe first arrived.

iOS 5 sounds great, though I feel the changes to the Lock Screen still fall short of Symbian S60 (and up), Android, and Windows Mobile. Of course, I suspect iOS 5 will in actuality, make the iPhone 3GS a useless near-brick following in the footsteps of iOS 4 and the iPhone 3G.

OS X Lion sounds great, though it also seems as if Apple is forcing all of its users to ditch their pointing devices for Magic Trackpads.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 4:55 PM (CDT)

1

But, yes, I would also worry about what effect it will have on my older devices. My move to a 3rd gen Touch came after iOS upgrades killed performance on my 1st gen. My 3rd gen Touch has suffered at the hands of the last upgrade and probably won’t survive the move to iOS5.

So now, there’s iOS5 and I think, yeah, that does all look pretty great but I’m even looking at my brand new iPad2 and I’m wondering will the performance take a hit? The battery life? Will it start to crash?

The conspiracy theorist in me would almost begin to think Apple purposely gimps older devices in upgrades but that’s a crazy notion, right? Crazy? It is, isn’t it?

Still, all that aside, iOS5 looks like yet another step forward. And, when it comes down to it, the reason I upgrade is because I love the features.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 5:00 PM (CDT)

1

Thanks for the coverage today as always top notch.

1 Notifications… finally defiantly needed the upgrade to a more organized way because what they had before was lacking to say the least. I do like the weather update in the notifications tray, not a big stocks user so would like to be able to customize that info to say MLB scores or new feed form different websites like CNN or yall’s, but overall I am defiantly happy with the changes.

2 iCloud… looks good for a free service. As an ATT employee we get so many people that come in with busted iphones or just upgrading and don’t know about syncing with itunes or don’t know how too so this will deff from now on out to set it up automatically when they get their phone. It would be cool to see advanced service that gave you this plus more like more storage, email addresses and itunes matching combined for a single price.

Side note thinking about joining the developers program so I don’t have to wait 3-4 months to get the new software. anyone else considering this??

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 5:10 PM (CDT)

1

Keep “innovating”, apple. iOS5 is even closer to having the same features as jailbroken devices have had for years.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 5:29 PM (CDT)

1

The only issue I see so far is for people like me that did not renew their MobileMe Accounts in the last month due to the “rumors” of the service becoming free. After all, why spend 99.00 on something about to be free.

Now I cannot reactivate my account and must wait until the iCloud release to setup a new account.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 5:55 PM (CDT)

1

One thing that really bugs me today is all the misinformation about the availability of itunes 10.3…I know the 10.3 beta is out but there are conflicting stories about 10.3 non beta being released today already, along with stories saying icloud being out for those of us using 4.3. and itunes 10.2.2
Who is right?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 6:28 PM (CDT)

1

@Farnsworth “I’m quite disappointed in the iTunes aspect of iCloud, particularly the iMatch service. Apple is effectively charging people a monthly to listen to their own (not-from-iTunes) music. I’d rather pay once for an iOS device with more local storage, and leave it at that.”

That was just one option—you can also just upload / sync your music up if you want. The $25/year is so you don’t have to upload it, if it finds a copy on your machine it just marks it as ‘bought’ and you get it on all the others, legally.

(.. i.e., all of that music you “ripped” *cough*torrented*cough*)

I’m not sure how they could have done better and gotten the record labels on board.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 6:35 PM (CDT)

1

I dunno. Mac user since 1985, and this time things seems different…
When they (Apple) dumped the floppy - I was 100% on board.
When Apple dumped SCSI and we saw Firewire, I was also sold.
It’s been that way for many things Apple. iOS5 sounds great. It’s obvious where the focus at Apple is today.
However, as a Mac person, I don’t get the same warm, fuzzies. Lion looks a lot about GUI changes, and little more. A nice feature here and there, but overall, underwhelming…
Does this mean anything? Or is it just that THIS WWDC is about iOS and the cloud? Time will tell.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 7:17 PM (CDT)

1

I am not impressed with the features that iOS 5 are touted to have. They are lackluster and I’m not overly excited about the future iOS. Will the twitter application be a must have like the Game Center where we can’t remove it? I don’t have twitter and will never use this feature. I want to be able to remove the apple applications that I don’t use as they take up space and are useless to me… Once the next iPhone is announced if it isn’t mind blowing then apple will lose a customer, and I’ve had one since they first came out.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 8:33 PM (CDT)

1

Lot’s of stuff announced, but really nothing we can use today. Why not just announce it “in the fall” (September? October? November?) and release it on the same day. It’s not like I have alternatives, unless I want to dump my i-Phone/Pad and MBP.

The iTunes Match doesn’t help me as my music is ripped at 320 or better.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 8:40 PM (CDT)

1

Some good stuff coming in iOS 5 (notably the message center), but not too excited about iCloud, wi-fi syncing, or OTA updates—somehow I just have a feeling that this is one of those “sounds great idea on paper” ideas, but will not be implemented reliably and lead to disappointed users. But, ya gotta start somewhere ...

Interesting to me is that in the 11:16am transcript of today’s keynote there was mention of “Smart Playlist sync from iTunes” ... smart playlists already sync from iTunes, so does this mean (a) Live Updating on the i-device will finally be operable again, or (b) We’ll be able to create smart playlists on the i-device, or (c) None of the above?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 8:45 PM (CDT)

1

Now finally Apple starts copying the goodies from Google (notification bar) and Blackberry (messenger). A little late - but better than never…. :)

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 10:02 PM (CDT)

1

iOS 5
-S/MIME is pretty exciting to me
-iMessenger on iPod Touch? Sounds like a move to use wifi and cut into AT&T’s SMS revenues. Way to stick it to the carriers! I hope there is the possibility for SMS gateways to non iOS devices. Like BBM, Apple may be the new target for countries like UAE, KSA, India or others that want access to messages. I’d like to know more how this is similar and different to BBM.

iCloud
-I hope Apple is able to crack the cloud where others failed. Making it part of life applications may finally do it.
-re-downloading existing purchased media reduces the need for local storage. I hope movies and tv shows will follow.
-Security of the cloud is still unknown. Will there be encryption in storage? What kind of access controls?
-iTunes Match will be a differentiator compared to other services from Google or Amazon. Rumors suggest most of the fee goes to record labels… a last ditch effort to recover losses from illegal downloads?
-my digital life is more about photo libraries. I hope there are premium options for my photo library. 30 days is too short.
-Apple may need to negotiate with ISPs to have exclusions on bandwidth caps or throttling as weave more media to the cloud.

Mac OS X
-I’d like to see license changes so we can install lion in virtual machines
-I don’t like downloading thatuch data.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 10:14 PM (CDT)

1

Some cool stuff, Gestures in Lion, full screen etc… IOS5 I like the revamp on notifications, iMessages I don’t get.. like Facetime if we lived in an ecosystem of ONLY iphones it would be great.. but I’ve got unlimited family texting and lots of friends/family that don’t have iphones. Is it that much better than SMS that I’m going to use 2 text services? Finally, iCloud… I’m a mobile me subscriber and they still can’t get calendar to sync correctly! Plus My subscription is paid till December… now I hear I’ll have to sign up for iCloud? I feel more like a sucker now than when I paid out the 99 dollars for me.com!

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 10:36 PM (CDT)

1

What I found most interesting was within the first minute of Steve Jobs talking about iCloud, an image appeared with none other than the current iPod Classic. Maybe a sign of things to come?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 11:33 PM (CDT)

1

I’m very excited about the new features of iCloud, lion & iOS 5. I’m looking forward to integrating them all to each of my devices. Its beginning to feel like what more can Apple & the developers add to keep their products ahead of the game?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 7, 2011 at 12:04 AM (CDT)

1

Very confused about how the Cloud auto-sync will behave with multiple family members sharing one iTunes account. MobileMe family users weren’t mentioned at all regarding a transition to the cloud. I really don’t know haw they’ll handle it but I know there are a lot of people in the same boat.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 7, 2011 at 12:15 AM (CDT)

1

i love it and everything about the new operating system, it would be better if it came out eariler.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 7, 2011 at 2:06 AM (CDT)

1

Looks interesting, but what i want to mknow is will I be able to update my smart playlists from the cloud or not?

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 7, 2011 at 4:19 AM (CDT)